these will be all the letters I have received on this , I hope this will answer anyone's questions on this issue. and sorry for the length of it but wanted them all in here.  I WOULD SUGGEST TO COPY AND PRINT THIS TO HAVE WITH YOU WHILE OUT IN MARYLAND JUST IN CASE!!

we are allowed to prospect using detectors, sluice, high bankers and dredges. but permission and land usage has to be given by the property owners.

Pans!

I don't know how many times people have come up to me and said, "All you really need is a pan to find gold." Technically that's true. All you really need to find gold is a pan. At some time, even with machinery, you will probably pick up a gold pan. Maybe not at the start, but more than likely at the end.

However, gold is a numbers game. The more dirt you process, the more gold you will find. Unless you hit the Mother lode, and are digging nuggets of gold. You are dealing with something much smaller. From flour to flakes to pickers. (Sounds like a double play team in baseball. “5-4-3 Double play!” I can almost hear the PA announcer.)

That’s where machinery comes into play. However, this isn’t about machinery, it’s about pans. Probably since the dawn of time, or at least when man first discovered gold, there have been gold pans. Sluices made of gold, were discovered in King Tut’s tomb. I would imagine there were gold pans made of real gold as well. But even before that, most likely pans were made out of slices of a tree trunk dished out. Wood has one problem, it swells, shrinks and cracks. So maybe the first real gold pans, as we know them, were made during the Bronze age.

However, where you find relics from gold rush times, you will find wooden pans. They could be turned out on machinery run from water wheels driven by long belts. Someone had a bright idea to go to the maker of a Knights armor and turn out gold pans. These would have been made of iron, as a Knights armor were iron plate. Eventually steel came into play, and I’m sure steel gold pans followed.

A mixture of steel and wood pans have been found from California to Australia. The Chinese prospectors are credited with introducing the riffle to the Gold pan. And you can still see a form of it today in modern steel pans. Prospectors really like steel gold pans because it served two purposes. First, of course, it was a gold pan. Second, it was their dinner plate. The pan could withstand heat, they ate off of it, cleaned it up and go back to prospecting. Maybe old time prospectors were the original , “Multi-taskers”?

Back in the mid-70’s, 1970’s that is, I’m not THAT old! I started with pie pans, which I liberated from my Mom’s cupboards. (Liberated sounds so much better than just helped myself, without ask asking. IE: Stole!) I had already been bitten by the Gold bug at age 10. However, I had no clue on how to actually find gold. (My first discovery was Pyrite, that I thought was gold.) I met a couple of guys prospecting the Whitewater River in Southern Indiana. They both had steel pans with grooves formed in the sides. They had found these in the back of “Popular Mechanics” magazine. (Might have been “Popular Science.” It’s been a long time for my memory.)

They are the ones that told me to,, “go get your Mother’s pie pans.” They had a wooden homemade rocker box lined with Shag carpeting! (This was the 70’s.) Back then, I didn’t know anything about flour gold. I thought all gold were nuggets, or at least pickers. So, I’d sift through sand from the river looking for gold I could see. I pretty much never did.

Fast forward to today. Today we have gold pans, still in steel. However, now there’s copper and the most one used are plastic. Plastic has opened up a world of new shapes, sizes and colors. (Again, another Triple Play team?) Today’s modern plastic pans come in round, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, U-shaped, to name the popular ones. And just about every color. Blue, green, red, black, purple, maroon, white and pink! Blue and green are the most popular, followed by black. Green and blue will make your gold stand out as well as your black sands. Black pans will make your gold “pop” out, but will hide fine black sands making final clean up difficult. The other colors, have their fans. I like blue, maroon and red for final clean ups.

Green is the most popular, but if you suffer from color blindness, then you want to stick with blue. Blue pretty much is still blue, throughout most color blindness. However, green can show up as various colors, including shades of yellow. They also come with various sizes of riffles. From no riffles to quite large riffles.

Sizes. Plastic pans range from 10” to 16”. Again, typically, bigger pans are used to work off the dirt and gravel and smaller pans are used for final clean ups. 16” pans can be a hand full, especially loaded with dirt and gravel. 14” can be as well, but is still easier to work off. 10” pans you can use one hand, but you’re limited to the amount of over burden you can work off at one time.

So, there you have it. Most small scale prospectors have many pans in there inventory. Lately there seems to be 1 - 2 new pans coming out every year. They always seem to have their supporters and their opposition. Like I always say, it’s what works best for you. I always seem to end up buying the new ones and trying them at least a few times.

Until next time, this is the old prospector.

Good Hunting!

If you feel that you have mastered your metal detector, or at least feel really comfortable using it.  Let your Law Enforcement know that you are willing to help if they ever need it.  Why you ask?  (Go ahead and ask why.)

Law Enforcement from time to time needs help.  Usually, there will be at least one officer with a metal detector on the squad.  However, if they are trying to find a stray bullet, or other item, one detector can't cover all the ground very fast.  That's where you come in.  Send a formal letter to the Chief of Police, the Sherrif and even if there is a State Police barracks in your town to the head Officer in charge.  Let them know that you are more than willing to help if they ever need it.  Years ago, I even included a nice photograph of some of my finds.

I'll give you a case in point.  There's a man I was introduced to, who bought a Side Scan Sonar system.  He had visions of using it in the Summer searching the lake he lived on for sunken motors, or just general treasure hunting in the lake.  He went around to the Marinas, and asked if he could put up a flier offering his services for items lost in the lake.  One Winter day, he got a call from the local Sherrif's office.  One of the Deputies had remember seeing his flier and wondered if he could help them out.  He readily agreed and loaded his equipment on their boat and went in search of what they were looking for.  (I'm sorry, I don't remember what it was, but he found it.)  The divers went into the frigid waters and retrieved it.

Now, not only is he called into help the local Sheriff's Dept.  But the Police and and State Highway Patrol.  All season, they call on him to use his equipment.  There was a missing girl and the State Highway Patrol presumed that the might have drowned in the lake.  They found her car parked near the water's edge.  So they called him in to start his search.  He laid out his grid pattern, and soon were searching the lake's bottom for any sign of human life.  They even had a boat with Cadavor dogs in it searching.  The dogs got a hit out in the water and he was called over with his Sonar.  It wasn't the missing girl, but it was a car.  Probably had been there for 20 years resting on the bottom.  The dogs were going crazy!  The car was pretty far out into the lake, but the divers were able to hook a cable to it and with the help of a crane, drag it to shore.  Inside the trunk was the remains of another woman, long since passed away.  They never did find the missing girl.  I'm not even sure that they found out who was locked away in the trunk of that car.

Don't you think that he has built up a good repore with the Law Enforcement Agencies?  I'm not saying you will find Jimmy Hoffa, but you maybe able to find a key piece of evidence!  Please note:  I would not do this if you just got your metal detector. 

Early this Summer, I wanted to search a Grade School that had been closed.  I pulled up with my van and metal detector.  In the parking lot was a Deputy Sherrif's car.  Not sure what the rules are in the town, I decided to go to him and ask if there was a problem if I searched the school grounds.  I also handed him my business card.  "Treasure Seekers International".  It has my name, web-site, address even my e-mail on it.  I told him who I was and that I wanted to search the school grounds and if there was a problem with that.  He said that since the school was abandoned, they didn't like anyone to be on the grounds, due to vandalism.  I expained that I wasn't there to cause any problems, and thanked him and I was ready to leave.  He told me that he had about an hour of paperwork to do.  That it would be alright it I searched while he was there.

I thanked him again, got my machine out of my van, and proceeded to search.  I was really hamped in my efforts due to the long grass.  (It was over a foot high and very thick!)  After about 30 minutes, I hadn't found a thing.  So I decided to pack it in.  I went back to his cruiser and expained to the deputy that the high grass was making it very hard to search and almost impossible to dig.  I thanked him and told him that I was going to go.  He handed me back my business card, and I told him to keep it.  That his Department should feel free to call me if they ever needed an area searched.  Now I don't know if they ever will.  However, if they do,  I'll be there.  (I'll also bring all of my machines just in case I run into long grass again.) 

The worse that a Law Enforcement Agency can say is, "No thanks". 

Until next time.  This is Charlotte49er saying, Good Hunting!

     Last week fed ex stopped by the shop with a box for me, aahh yes my Sandy has arrived!! Come to poppa my lil’ friend!! In the previous weeks leading up to this purchase I was pondering how little time I have to hone my detecting skills, between home and work there just wasn’t any time left for detecting, meanwhile reading in the forums about Terry in New York just killing it up there with his beach detector. Now I don’t know how he ended up stuck up in NY but him being from Arizona that’s just got to be brutal. What I do know is that Terry knows lemonade, in the beginning you could tell his spirit was a bit down, he wasn’t even on the forums for a while…then he started squeezing the lemons, got himself a Tesoro Sandshark and started working the beaches, with a good degree of success I might add, then his normal posts came rolling in to the forums accompanied by some photo’s and some youtube video’s, yep… ol’ Terry was back!!

          That got me to thinking …I got started in this hobby back in and around 94-95  beach detecting, and now I’ve kind of put it to the side and focused on gold prospecting, maybe Terry’s on to something and I should be too!! So there it was..sitting in front of me like the winning lottery ticket at the local SPMA door prize giveaway, my own Sandshark all wrapped up in bubble-wrap and waiting to be put together and put through its paces. I considered several models before settling on this one, nothing was based on price, it was just based on what was being said on the forums about the particular models I was considering, one high end model had folks talking about cheap dials that would break off and they were ending up replacing them with aftermarket dials (forget that!!) but there was one detector that everyone was happy with (Including Terry) and that was the Tesoro Sandshark. The Internet…when used to your advantage can be the greatest tool of them all for finding treasure!

           So now the game plan is to put this detector together and hit the beach this weekend and practice, practice, practice, needless to say 5 am is a bit too much for me so I opted for an afternoon run to a beach in Coronado,Ca. I took my 12 yr old daughter for company and to see if she would have enough attention span to work the Bounty Hunter I bought her a year ago, its hard to buy a kids style detector because they typically have a hard time swinging anything heavy and when you get a light kids version like this Bounty Hunter they typically don’t go very deep, and if a kid isn’t pulling coins out every two feet well you all know what happens... their attention span fly’s out the door, anyway when we arrived at the first beach we unpacked and found that the clouds and overcast had kept the beach fairly vacant which is perfect for us... we, or I should say (I) worked about a hundred yards with nothing but bottle caps…not good because my daughter gets her lack of attention span from ME!! So we left for another beach just down the road.

         This next beach is called “The Silver Strand” state beach and it usually charges 10 bucks to get in during the summer months and stops charging after Labor Day so I thought I was in good shape but when I arrived low and behold there was indeed a park ranger at the booth wanting ten bucks from ol’ Bucket. I told her I thought they quit charging after Labor Day and she said they charge year round now…no problem I thought to myself, I’ll just flash her my credentials (a Bucket&Boomer T-shirt) have my daughter giver her the sad eye’s and we’ll be on our way for free!! Anyway....so after getting the boot from the park ranger we were parked across the road in a residential area…for free I might add and making our way to the beach, when we got there we fired up our detectors and got to work, now being the first time I’ve ever used this detector I’m not about to slap on some hip waders and get waist deep in the hoopla (Pacific Ocean) I wanted to figure some things out first, and let me tell you that the learning curve for this particular beach detector…as is with most Tesoro’s  is very short!

              In no time I was yerking....yes "yerking" up bottle caps 10 inches down so I new I was on the right track, I worked the storm break of piled sand and in one three foot area between me and my daughter we pulled up 32 pennies, one of them being a 1927 wheat cent! At one point we were scooping pennies three at a time from their sandy graves…a bonified cache!!  (OK maybe that’s going a bit too far), and as the pennies thinned out so did my kids attention span so I was left to myself to work the rest of the storm break while she chased birds up and down the beach. As I headed south down the break I hit a nickel then a dime…at this point I’d swear I was “Loaming” as the denominations were getting bigger then I ran into a Heineken bottle cap , and another and another so I figured there should be roughly six of these screwing me up, if I can gather all six I should be clear of these little discouragers, well at around ten of em I was impressed with this guys drinking skills and knew I had a twelve pack to contend with, once I found that 12^th and final cap I was happy now and I could focus on this area…sure enough..no more bottle caps and shortly thereafter I pulled up a couple dimes, a quarter and a very thin (fake) gold (colored) ring!

     The afternoon had by now, given up to the evening and it was getting dark and time to call it a day, but I was very happy with the way that this metal detector handled the beach, it was very stable, easy to use, fairly light and best of all very reasonably priced, I would actually call it a steal!!  I plan on…in the coming months regularly using this Tesoro Sandshark  and posting on its successes. Terry motivated me and now its my turn to pass it on!! So get out there all you taters at home and make your own LEMONADE !!!!!!!         Bucket

Where to look to find gold

You will find gold in different spot in streams. Water is the primary agent in the creation of most placer deposits. Moving water can contain huge amounts of sentiment materials, by way of fine silt to large river rocks, especially in the course of run-off time periods. When freed from the particular mountain by means of weathering, gold is usually added to stream waters along with rock debris, and it is moved down by way of the stream. Where streams meander you can find gold, if it goes over falls you can find gold, or are deflected around rocks is good place to find gold, if a drop in water velocity takes place you can often times find gold, and the gold drops out there. Extended agitation by way of water causes gold to settle all the way down through the gravel right up until reaching bedrock or an impenetrable clay layer that is where you find gold nuggets. These concentrations are known as pay streaks that would be nice to find gold pay streaks.

Best chances to find gold

The best locations to uncover gold exist wherever turbulence change to slower-moving waters flow. Check out slower moving water down below rapids and waterfalls, deepened pools, and the downstream section involving big chunks of rock. On the inside turns of meanders, upstream ends with fine sand as well as 'point" bars are good locations for you to pan fine gold, which can be replaced each year during runoff. Bedrock crevices or pockets acting as natural riffles can accumulate gold. Scoop out there and pan material from these places. Spring, very early summer months, and just before freeze within the fall are wonderful points during the year to go panning. Water is low and gold-bearing rock is exposed which makes it easier to find gold. To lessen resource damage, restrict excavating to active, unvegetated stream gravels.

Tools you will need to find gold

The basic equipment is quite simple and requires only a minimum investment. A gold pan is most important. Metal pans were used by early prospectors; modem versions are plastic with built-in riffles. In a pinch, frying pans and even hub caps will work. New metal pans generally come with a coating of grease and should be cleaned thoroughly by heating over an open fire. The pan will rust, but some rust is beneficial for collecting fine gold and help find gold.

Suggested equipment to find gold.

• gold pan (plastic with riffles or metal); 14" size is best.
• shovel to loosen gravel from creek bottom.
• grizzly pan with 1/2-inch holes in bottom; this pan helps separate coarse gravel, speeding up the panning process.
• magnifying lens (at least 10X power) to identify minerals.
• sluice box, approximately 3 feet long; (construct or obtain commercially; aluminum version is available.)
• tweezers for picking up gold; a dry finger will also work.
• small magnet for separating out magnetic black sands.
• small glass vials to hold gold.
• rubber gloves to protect hands from cold water.
• rubber boots to keep feet dry while wading in creeks.

Good luck on you next trip to find gold it will pay off some day.

More at http://prospectminingforgold.com

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Gold Mining is an excellent approach to to enjoy the truly amazing outdoors. An increasing number of hobbyists are trying to find gold mining equipment to aid his or her recreational gold mining actions. For these particular hobbyists, there is absolutely no better exhilaration as compared with hunting for nuggets regarding gold, similar to the enthusiasts from the initial gold rush during the Nineteenth century. [...] Read more